


The Weight of Days

by Snowstorminmychest



Category: La Peste | The Plague - Albert Camus
Genre: Because there’s a plague epidemic, Caring Tarrou, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Professionals, Quite a lot of that, Roommates, Seriously what else after that swimming scene, Sleep Deprivation, Traumatized Rieux, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28484097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowstorminmychest/pseuds/Snowstorminmychest
Summary: With no end in sight for the epidemic, it’s up to Tarrou to comfort an exhausted plague doctor.
Relationships: Bernard Rieux/Jean Tarrou
Kudos: 4





	The Weight of Days

“They keep asking if I’m scared,” said doctor Rieux in a colourless voice.

Tarrou closed the notebook spread across his knees, put it down on the sofa’s armrest, and looked up at the doctor standing in the doorway. Rieux looked as though he was barely standing, which was, frankly, quite understandable. Their days were long, and their labour in vain. Tarrou remembered what Rieux had told him: as a doctor, his task would have been to heal, but he felt that ever since the plague broke out, he had done no healing whatsoever. All there was to do was to isolate the suspected cases in an attempt to contain the epidemic, but evidently that was far from enough. And they had almost no means to help those who got the disease. When the bubonic plague cases had been the majority, Rieux could at least hope that by lancing the lymph node abscesses and trying to eradicate the focus of infection, the body could at least be given a chance to defeat the disease. But there really was nothing to be done against pneumonic plague. All patients admitted to the hospital received Castel’s serum, but so far its only effect seemed to be the prolongation of the patients’ agony. Still, Rieux and his friends had to be there, to show up every day, again and again. Getting some quality sleep in the few hours they spent at home would have helped. But that evidently wasn’t the case now, because Rieux was standing there leaning against the doorway, looking upset and weary, at about two o’clock at night. He was wearing simple dark grey pyjamas, and Tarrou had to acknowledge once again how good dark colours looked on him. What would have looked even better on him was a proper night’s sleep, and perhaps the lack of a natural disaster to wage pointless war against – but if there had ever been such a time in his life, Tarrou hadn’t known him then, so he could only guess.

But in any case, he now smiled at the doctor hovering in the doorway, and patted the sofa next to him invitingly. Not much change occured in Rieux’s expression – he seldom showed his emotions by default, but during the fight against the plague, their emotions and any manifestations of their humanity seemed to have had retreated even farther below the surface. He cast his eyes down for a moment, then stepped into the room without a word, and walked over to Tarrou. The extent of his exhaustion was evident from his movements: one of the very first things Tarrou had noted about him was his swift and energetic gait. Now, he seemed to be deliberately avoiding all unnecessary movement, walking slowly and heavily, as though he had no strenghth to spare. Almost as if he had aged at least fifteen years from the start of the plague. Although, now that Tarrou thought about it, it was rather comforting to imagine a doctor Rieux, fifteen years older, who, having survived the plague, learned from it what he could, and then carried on where he had left off.

Rieux slumped down next to Tarrou, his body an inert weight. Tarrou put his arm around him without a word, and Rieux drew closer, resting his head on the other man’s chest. The doctor had once told Tarrou about pronouncing someone dead, about the silence above his patients’ chests, about what it felt like to shine a light into pupils that didn’t contract. This silence was to him far worse than any sound could be, however gruesome (rattles, rales, crepitation), simply because it was so unnatural, and it reminded him about how his work is always in vain, and how he must be defeated again and again. He also told Tarrou how unreasonably rough his own pulse can seem, felt in his fingertips in place of the patient’s, and how unjust it all is. And that he can only hope that the patients’ souls may find rest in this silence, but that his can never.

So Tarrou remained silent. He knew that the most he may give to doctor Rieux in this moment is his own healthy heartbeat (rhytmical, normal volume, no audible murmurs present, as he read in the charts when helping with the paperwork), and his calm, steady, clear breathing. He hoped that if it isn’t in his power to erase from Rieux’s soul all the wheezing and crackling and the hearts gallopping towards exhaustion from the fever, and the silence afterwards, he can at least give him something else. And sitting there in the night, with an exhausted doctor in his arms, he was thinking, among other things, about faith healing and the laying on of hands. As their powerlessness in the face of the plague took on greater and greater proportions, he saw how Rieux himself could only put his hope in miracles and coincidences. Science could only inform them that the mortality of pneumonic and septic plague is close to a hundred percent, but Tarrou had been there by the bed of the dying little boy, watching Rieux as well as the child. The doctor had been pretending to check the child’s pulse, or maybe even he himself had thought he was doing only that, but Tarrou understood that at that moment he was trying to give of his own vitality, to impart his own health on the boy, to keep him alive by the sheer force of his will, and in this respect there was not much of a difference from what Father Paneloux did, which was to fall to his knees at the bedside and beg for mercy for the boy.

He felt somewhat similar now, trying to offer the solace of his heartbeat and breathing, his own life force, to the doctor who was running out of his own. It also occured to him that this might be his most important task at the moment in the whole plague-stricken city.

When Rieux raised his eyes, that terrible weariness was still there, maybe a little diminished, but not by much.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and made a heroic attempt to smile.

Tarrou smiled back at him, and shrugged dismissively.

“Anytime,” he said simply. He decided against adding “at least until one or both of us is taken by the plague”, because he felt that would be stating the obvious, and besides, it made no change to the essence of things at all. And the essence of things was...

“Can I stay a bit longer?” the doctor asked tentatively. “I can’t go to sleep. I keep...”

Tarrou waited a moment, to see if he wanted to say what he was thinking of exactly, which element of the horror, the blackened fingertips of the plague patients, the agitated patients thrashing in bouts of uncontrollable fever, their families with their desperate questions which he could never answer reassuringly, or something else entirely. But Rieux didn’t finish the sentence, so Tarrou responded like he always did.

“Of course,” he said with a smile, and made room for Rieux to lie down completely, with his head resting in Tarrou’s lap.

It was quiet for a moment, and Tarrou watched the doctor’s face attentively.

“I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to ask that,” Rieux said faintly, although Tarrou thought he had already fallen asleep. “If I’m scared. I have no idea what to say to that.”

Tarrou had to seriously think about this for a moment.

“You mean of the plague?” he asked at last, realizing. Rieux nodded. “Ah,” said Tarrou, and retreated into his thoughts again. “Maybe they want to make sure that their plague doctor is a human being as well,” he said thoughtfully at last. “Or that he isn’t one. I’m not sure which one would be more reassuring.”

Rieux shook his head.

“I suppose they either want me to reassure them that they’re not going to get it, or that it isn’t that dangerous. But I can’t do that.”

Tarrou nodded. He knew right from the first sentence that plague patients, or the families of plague patients, would not ask such questions. In the beginning, they tended to ask things like “Doctor, it’s not _that_ , is it? It’s not the plague, is it?”, or things like “am I going to die?” But lately they seemed to have given up on asking, probably because they felt that the answer to both questions would likely be yes, and anyhow, all their strenghth was being used up in the battle laying waste to their bodies, their lungs and blood vessels. Such questions could only come from Rieux’s non-plague patients, or the nursing staff from other hospitals now ordered to work on the plague wards.

“And what did you answer?” Tarrou asked curiously.

“I haven’t figured it out yet. Usually I try and defuse it with some cliché... yes, of course, we’re all afraid. And that’s true as well, but...” He gave a tired sigh and shook his head, resigned.

“They’re asking the wrong question,” Tarrou finished simply.

“Yes. I don’t understand why the answer would matter. My patients are scared too, and it makes no difference for them either. What am I supposed to say? Yes, of course I wouldn’t like to suffocate slowly and excruciatingly, but why is that significant?”

Tarrou nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

“I think they wouldn’t like to know what you’re actually afraid of. It’s still kind of comprehensible if you’re afraid of catching it from your patients. The rest...”

The doctor had told Tarrou about the time when, after the discussion with Castel where they declared that the new disease really is in fact the plague, he sat in his study, gazing out at the cliffs, trying to reconcile this information with his life and practice up to that point, and not being especially successful. He had learned about the plague at university, knew about the sylvatic and the urban cycles, knew how the replicating bacteria obstruct the fleas’ digestive tract and cause them to regurgitate their stomach contents teeming with bacteria into the bloodstream of their next host, a rat, or a human in the urban cycle, and he knew how, with the progression of epidemics, a directly spreading, highly contagious form, the pneumonic plague could emerge, with a mortality of a hundred percent, and he had read excerpts from the historical accounts about the plague of Justinian and the Black Death, but he still felt that he and Oran could simply have nothing to do with these things. But “the rest” was written in the chronicles.

“Yes,” doctor Rieux said slowly. He spoke haltingly, sluggishly, as if he was half-asleep. “My own death isn’t that frightening. Then at least I wouldn’t have to direct the hospital, or pronounce any more deaths. But there aren’t any more doctors, there already aren’t enough, and if this continues any longer, if the numbers of new cases and deaths continue to rise so steeply, then there won’t be any more buildings to convert into hospitals, and there’s going to be a shortage of not only people to care for the sick, but literally no room to put beds in, and we’ll have to care for patients in the streets, if that can be called patient care at all, and the people are going to be dying out in the streets like rats, and the people whose job it would be to clean the bodies are going to die as well, and the corpses are going to spread the infection to the rest, and a good third or half of Oran’s population is going to die. Not to even mention that we know full well that it’s possible to get out of the city, the guards can be bribed, but you don’t even really have to get out, it’s enough to send a packet illegally, because the bacterium can stay alive on there until it finds a new host, and then it’s not only Oran’s citizens that die, but it’s going to spread across the whole of Algeria, the whole of Africa, and one cannot put the whole world in quarantine.

Tarrou was silent. He suspected the doctor’s stance on these things to be something similar, but it still pained him to see him so desperate. He caressed his face softly, realised he was trying, again, to heal by the laying on of hands. Though maybe it does work on despair, even when the despair is justified. 

“And do you reckon they know that the microbe strives to survive, just as we do?” Rieux continued. “That maybe it has already mutated in one of the rats, only for it to return even more deadly and disastrous, just when we think we’ve defeated it and we can let our guard down?” He gave a weary sigh. “And if the world has become such a place, then...”

Tarrou fixed his attention on him, curious. In his experience thus far, people tended to finish this sentence with expressions such as “then God have mercy on us”, but Rieux had made it very clear to him on their first meeting that he cannot turn to God, or at least really doesn’t want to, because he cannot accept a creation like this, one that has plagues in it for example, among other things. It was just as well that he never finished the sentence, and Tarrou only realised a little later that it was also because he had fallen asleep at last.

Tarrou marveled a little more at the beauty of the sleeping doctor’s face, which seemed a little more peaceful now, as much as the current circumstances allowed. He hoped Rieux would be dreaming about something other than the plague, but it wasn’t very likely. Carefully, he bent down to plant a gentle kiss on his forehead, and inhaled the faint scent of his skin, rosemary and lavender.

When he straightened up, the plague-stricken city rushed in though the windows. It enveloped them in its deathly silence, it was there in the screams sometimes reaching their ears, in the sick, febrile breath emanating from the streets.

Tarrou looked back on the doctor’s face, and examined it thoroughly, as though trying to commit every detail to memory. Smiling, he turned off the reading lamp, and when his eyes adjusted to the moonlit darkness, opened his notebook and began a brand new page.

And neither of them could have known, but right at that moment, Grand was hunched over his desk, calculating the day’s statistics. At first he thought he must have made a mistake, but then, checking the numbers again, got the same result: it seemed as though on that day, for the first time in long months, the death toll was decreasing.


End file.
